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The Vaccination Line: Action Needed
If you are interested in priority for yourself, family, or friends regarding the COVID vaccine, I suggest you keep a close eye on your state’s guideline development and, if you disagree, contact your elected officials. The CDC priority recommendations have been impacted by the Woke and Social Justice crowd, straying from an approach designed to save the most lives and instead incorporating concepts of racial equity, even if those concepts cost more lives.
The CDC was originally going to prioritize vaccinating essential workers (for more on that category read below) above those older than 65 and not in long-term care. Because of how COVID mortality skews so heavily as you get older, and because vaccine availability is limited, lowering priority could mean a two- to three-month delay, which means a higher death toll. After public pushback, the CDC added those 75+ to the priority list but still omitted 65-74 who also have a markedly higher death rate.
Some states on their own are taking even more radical approaches, like Massachusetts which is prioritizing prisoners over the elderly, while some, like Texas, are instituting priority systems more aligned with saving the maximum amount of lives.
In Arizona, the state health department is, as of now, proceeding with implementing along the lines set out by the CDC. I wrote our governor yesterday requesting reconsideration and will be doing the same with my state representatives today.
For more details on what is going on, read further.
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Here’s a very sensible priority scheme from the UK which it describes as representing “around 99% of preventable mortality from COVID-19.”
1. residents in a care home for older adults and their carers
2. all those 80 years of age and older and frontline health and social care workers
3. all those 75 years of age and older
4. all those 70 years of age and older and clinically extremely vulnerable individuals
5. all those 65 years and older
6. all individuals aged 16 to 64 years with underlying health conditions which put them at serious risk of disease and higher mortality
7. all those 60 years of age and older
8. all those 55 years of age and older
9. all those 50 years of age and older
Here’s an analysis explaining the UK approach:
The UK plan makes sense if your priority is saving lives. Fatality rates skew very much towards the elderly with covid. Here’s the current U.S. data showing each age group as a percentage of overall covid deaths:
85+ : 31%
75-84: 27%
65-74: 22%
55-64: 12%
45-54: 5%
35-44: 2%
25-34: 0.7%
15-24: 0.2%
Along the same lines this is the Arizona mortality rate per covid case by age:
65+: 10.3%
55-64: 2.3%
45-54: 0.8%
20-44: 0.2%
< 20: 0.02%
What this means is if you get covid and are 65 or older your chance of dying is 51 times that of someone between 20 and 44 who has covid. Note: If Arizona broke its 65+ data down in more detail you would probably see something more like a 5% rate for those 65-74, 10% for 75-84, and 20% for those 85+.
A way to visualize the differential risk by age:
There is an alternative methodology to that selected by the U.K. which would focus on years of life saved. For instance, an 85-year-old may have an additional life expectancy of four years, versus a 40-year-old with 40 years of life expectancy. Who should get priority for the vaccine? I don’t think the arguments are as strong as that in an age-based scheme because the death rates skew so dramatically with covid, but it is an argument at least worth thinking about.
Unfortunately, the United States seems focused on other factors, at least in part, which led to the flawed recommendations made on Sunday by the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (it now goes to CDC Director Redfield for a final decision). According to Stat News, the panel recommended the highest priority for those in long term care and health care workers which makes sense, with the second priority to those 75 and older and frontline essential workers, which makes less sense, and the third priority to those 65 and older, people 16 to 64 years old with high-risk medical conditions, and essential workers not included in the second phase of vaccination, which makes even less sense, if the priority is saving the maximum amount of lives. It turns out that was not the Committee’s highest priority.
Here’s an alternative approach, rejected by the “experts.”
The first problem is the size of categories the CDC and Committee is using which is going to lead to a lot of confusion and infighting, particularly because they contain 202 million people (60% of US population) and there will only be about 100 million vaccine doses available before March (24 million in Phase 1a, 49 million in Phase 1b, and 129 million in Phase 1c). This is how academics decide things, not people with practical experience on implementation. The UK approach takes much smaller slices of population in a clearly understandable sequence, and should be much more manageable.
But the real problem is when you try to answer the question – why would the CDC committee recommend a priority list that would result in more deaths? The answer is the injection of Critical Race and Social Justice Theory and into public health decisions.
Frontline essential workers are defined as:
“first responders, teachers and other education workers including day care workers, food and agriculture workers, correctional facility staff, postal workers, public transit workers, and people who work in manufacturing and in grocery stores”
And Stat News quotes Peter Szilagyi, a committee member and pediatrician at UCLA;
“I voted for this recommendation because in my opinion, it follows the evidence about the risk from coronavirus and the ethical principles that we have developed on ACIP to maximize the benefits and minimize harms, promote justice, and to minimize health inequities. We are trying to thread the needle here.”
Stat News goes on to mention the lone dissenter to the committee recommendation:
Henry Bernstein, a pediatrician and professor at the Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell, said he felt that adults aged 65 and older should have been in Phase 1b. The toll the virus takes on people 65 to 74 is not substantially different from its impact on people 75 and older, he argued.
So, what’s going on here? Bernstein’s position is very clear. If you look at risk and lives you save many more lives by including 65-74 year olds in Phase 1b.
But what, precisely, is Dr. Szilagyi saying? He’s rambling about “ethical principles,” “justice,” and “health inequities.” That’s just jargon. What does it mean in practice? Why can’t he say what he means as clearly as Dr. Bernstein? It’s because he trying to obscure what he means.
Let me translate. What Dr. Szilagyi is saying is, “because blacks are a disproportionate amount of essential workers, and are at disproportionate risk, it is inequitable to give them lower priority on the vaccine, so older people must be lower priority and more of them die, including those at most risk, black seniors, in order to be equitable.” Please don’t mistake talk of “equity” for that of “equality”. Equality is treating people equally, though they may eventually have different outcomes in life. Equity means that any difference in outcome for a minority is attributable to white supremacy, is therefore racist, and society must be adjusted to correct that outcome.
Yes, I know it doesn’t make sense but that’s the way these social justice people think, and now you know why he won’t say it clearly. When Dr. Szilagyi says, “We are trying to thread the needle“, he is referring to designing a system in which more people die than necessary while, at the same time, obscuring what they are doing.
To understand how the committee came out here, it is important to note that the CDC “experts” originally were going adopt an even worse alternative. This was their original draft analysis. First, they looked at science and implementation and the 65+ category came out ahead:
Ah, but then come Ethics!
And suddenly, non-healthcare essential workers are ahead!
So, the original recommendation was that essential non-healthcare workers get priority over anyone who was over 65 and not in long-term care. And, as one commentator noted:
“Incidentally, this report has many classic bureaucratic hallmarks: – the spurious symmetry of three equally weighted categories, each with sub-categories – the erratic marking thereof – the artificial separation of “Ethics” and “Science” – the opaque and questionable modelling”
This leaked and the blowback was so severe the committee agreed to extend priority to the over-75 crowd, even though substantial lives could be saved by lowering the age to 65. No surprise, the New York Times found a bioethics “expert” (bioethics, by the way, is an immoral academic field) to opine that more elderly white people needed to die in order to provide equity.
Not to be outdone, Marcella Nunez Smith of Yale’s School of Public Health, and co-chair of Joe Biden’s newly announced COVID-19 Advisory Board, complimented the CDC experts for “taking political interference out of the process” and for their “grounding in inequity.” Huh? They took science out of the process and injected ideology. These people are dangerous. Americans will die because of them.
This piece by stalwart liberal Yascha Mounk describes the moral depravity involved:
“. . . there are also some bedrock principles on which virtually all moral philosophers have long agreed.
The first is that we should avoid “leveling down” everyone’s quality of life for the purpose of achieving equality. It is unjust when some people have plenty of food while others are starving. But alleviating that inequality by making sure that an even greater number of people starve is clearly wrong. The second is that we should not use ascriptive characteristics like race or ethnicity to allocate medical resources. To save one patient rather than another based on the color of their skin rightly strikes most philosophers—and most Americans—as barbaric. The Centers for Disease Control have just thrown both of these principles overboard in the name of social justice.
In one of the most shocking moral misjudgments by a public body I have ever seen, the CDC invoked considerations of “social justice” to recommend providing vaccinations to essential workers before older Americans even though this would, according to its own models, lead to a much greater death toll. After a massive public outcry, the agency has adopted revised recommendations. But though these are a clear improvement, they still violate the two bedrock principles of allocative justice—and are likely to cause unnecessary suffering on a significant scale.
Since states will now have to decide whether to follow the CDC’s recommendations, the fight for a just distribution of the vaccine is not yet over. At the same time, the past days have already taught us two lessons that sum up some of the most worrying developments of the past years: The attack on philosophically liberal principles has by now migrated from leafy college campuses to the most important and powerful organizations in the country. And, in part as a result, it is getting harder and harder to trust institutions from the CDC to the New York Times.”
Every day I am more convinced that getting rid of the poison the Woke is injecting into American society must be the number-one priority for decent Americans.
Now let’s look more closely at the definition of the frontline workers to be included in Phase 1b. First responders mean police and firefighters, not EMTs. My comment two paragraphs below covers them.
But why teachers? We’ve known since summer that schools are low risk for covid, both for students and teachers. And unlike the others in this category who’ve been working since the start of the pandemic, most teachers have not been working in person and their unions have been insistent on keeping schools closed despite the science.
The other categories also contain significantly lower mortality risks. In some instances, for instance, meatpacking plants, we’ve seen major case outbreaks but with very low mortality rates. Moreover, we have now gone for nine months with covid, with essential workers not having access to vaccines, and our supply chains have not been disrupted (to my surprise but it is true).
If the mortality demographics of covid were different there might be a case for prioritizing groups with lower mortality but who can transmit to more those more vulnerable on the theory that transmission chains can be broken. But the covid mortality rates above 65 are so much higher than for those younger, that strategy would take much longer than direct vaccination of the vulnerable.
A UK strategy, stratified for age in smaller groups, would also capture those essential workers below 65 who have dangerous conditions which may cause issues if they get covid.
Published in General
Thank you for that analysis.
I’ll say it again: Ethics experts are the people you consult when you need rationalization for doing something shoddy.
Yet another alternative is to prioritize the stopping of the spread of the virus.
If that was the main goal, we should prioritize bar-goers, church-goers, and restaurant-goers, because we are told that is where the virus is spread the most.
But I thought it was racist to say that blacks and Hispanics are more prone to ill health?
It should be noted that most vaccines require 2 doses, so 100M doses is only enough for 50M people.
It is immoral to choose an order other than by risk which is about the same as oldest first, then people that care for elderly in facilities. Everyone should speak up on this. Remember, injustice anywhere should not be tolerated.
Retail clerks, waiters, bartenders. The point of contact for the public, breaking spread but stopping transmission at the service interface.
Washington and Oregon are already vaccinating prisoners and their guards. Convicts more important to the State than Taxpayers.
Mickey Kaus (one of the few liberals worth reading) had a good column at Newsweek (you know the magazine that sold for $1 a few years ago):
https://www.newsweek.com/wokeism-should-terrify-liberals-opinion-1557871
Best line -If you thought Woke CDC was bad, wait till you see Woke CMS
Since the libs want Medicare for all Woke CMS will probably opt to euthanize old white men b/c of white supremacy…..
These are not vaccines. They are pharmaceutical products, that would never have been considered for the general use for the population if the power forces of Bill Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation had not joined forces back in 2009.
The plan in 2009 was to innoculate the public with enough fear that everyone would be demanding a vaccine for the swine fly that was scheduled to reach pandemic proportions that year.
However, the definition held by the World Health Organization by which pandemics were determined to exist could not be reached by this outbreak of influenza. So that vaccine fell by the wayside.
Determined to never let that happen again, the Gates/Rockefeller forces campaigned so that over the coming decade, WHO re-defined the term “pandemic” to mean any novel infection widely occurring in many nations across the globe. Amazingly, it was no longer even necessary for there to be a statistical threshold of deaths per cases that needed to be reached. If an infection was deemed “novel,” it was considered to have spread across many nations in a sudden outbreak, irregardless of how few or how many died, it could be declared a “pandemic.”
Meanwhile, Gates saw to it that almost every possible independently occurring thinking could be negated by his economic influence. He used his tax-sheltering monies that had been re-purposed as “Foundations” to allow him to not only avoid paying taxes but to influence the world of:
Meanwhile Anthony Fauci, a Gates family protege who has been in a governmental position every since the days of Poppy Bush, patented the exact biological structure needed to act as a biological programming entity, so that it could carry whatever viral material of fully sequenced or partially sequenced genetics that might be required for a given vaccine. This glyco protein patent was issued to Anthony Fauci in 2015.
Without any possibility of any indie voices that mattered remaining, the virus was launched sometime in late 2019 in China. Also at about the same time, Charles Lieber, a Harvard researcher, happened to be arrested carrying metal cannistors inside a Boston airport before boarding a plane to Wuhan China. Perhaps the Wuhan flu would have been exactly at the 3.4% fatality rates that the Gate’s puppet Neil Ferguson claimed the public could expect, had Lieber not been captured by the FBI.
During summer of 2020, activists in Britain submitted a freedom of Information Act demanding the government produce the source of a purified and properly genetically sequenced virus to show that this “COVID 19” was a spearpate illness. The UK MHRA then admitted that the Pfizer vaccine mRNA elecment is a based on a computer generated genomic sequence amplified from a RNA fragment found inside a single experiment from Wuhan, back in Feb 2020.
Remarkably no exact replicant or similar virus has been isolated anywhere in the world at any time since.
Please desist with your conspiracy mongering. You’ve already started scores of you own threads with that theme. Leave this one alone.
My conspiracy mongering is not causing 6 times the number of HS aged young people to kill themselves as now die from the dread COVID 19. Nor is it causing 3 times the numbers of hospitality and restaurant workers to do themselves in as succumb to COVID.
Our economy is now in the toilet. Food shortages are about to become a reality, and then what?
However when asking and answering quo buono? the answer is our former adversary, now our nation’s controller: Red China.
It is those like you who have willingly swallowed the propaganda fest created by Gates/Rockefeller who are destroying our society and abolishing freedoms, not me.
You need your tin foil hat. You DO NOT NEED A VIRUS to make an mRNA vaccine- all you need is the mRNA sequence-hence the speed in which the mRNA vaccines were made. The vaccine development was started with hours of the publication of the mRNA sequence. If you listen to people like Saloui he stated the “platform” was ready-ie mRNA vaccine technology.
Addendum-You are also absolutely factually INCORRECT on the 2009 H1N1 vaccination program-it DID NOT fall by the wayside -46 million doses in the USA alone. According to Wikipedia estimated 300 US lives saved-and would have been more if there were fewer delays in implementing the program.
We may have to agree to disagree with your first point about what is needed for a vaccine to be a vaccine.
However my meaning in using the phrase “That it fell by the wayside” was regarding the overall goal of Bill Gates and Rockefeller Foundation back in 2009 – to have an all inclusive, mandated-for-every-single American vaccine program, that would have had each of the 308 million of us alive at the time vaxxed for the swine flu shot. Sorry for not making that clearer.
There is a big difference between 46 mil doses of a vax and 308 million for Bill CaChing Gates. He’s spent the past 11 yrs ensuring his goal will be met this time around.
CarolJoy- there is no disagreeing about facts such as what is needed to make an mRNA vaccine- facts are facts. Only the left believes in “my truth” or in “higher truths” (ie lies that advance the cause).
Re-upped just to like this. Hear, hear.
Zeke Emanuel: why I want to die at 75
Joe Biden is 78 and chose Emanuel (oncology) to be on his covid task force
In Los Angeles, over 70% of ICU patients are Hispanic, many not legal
Pfizer or Moderna had a vaccine ready to be tested on Jan 14
Fauci does have patents and his financial conflicts of interest need to be examined
Mister Bitcoin -spreading false information. Dr Fauci DOES NOT have patents- he is listed as a principal investigator/inventor on multiple patents related to his HIV research (for which he is world famous). The patents are held by the US government-the relevant administrative law on such matters is very clear.
addendum-corrected post to address Mister Bitcoin rather the CarolJoy since he was the actual author- my mistake
Yes b/c the Chinese published the mRNA sequence the week BEFORE. It is relatively easy to make the mRNA-hence why Moderna (created to exploit mRNA technologies) has garnered billions from venture capitalists. As stated above, Moncef Slaoui has stated the “platform” (ie mRNA vaccine technology) was mature and therefore ready to make a mRNA vaccine so quickly. Mr Slaoui stated back in the late spring that he expected to have 2 vaccines with at least 70% effectiveness this year.
addendum- as I stated in an earlier post-you do NOT need the virus to make the mRNA vaccine (altho CarolJoy continues to claim you do). Here is a good overview:
https://www.businessinsider.com/moderna-designed-coronavirus-vaccine-in-2-days-2020-11
while this article cites Jan 11th as the publication date of the mRNA sequence IIRC I heard it was available a day or two earlier on the web.
as far as the citation for the Chinese publication of the mRNA sequence-since the conspiracy mongers have lots of time to dream up/spread false &/or incomplete information involving Bill Gates, the Rockefeller Foundation, Fauci, the CFR, the Illunimate etc-they certainly have time to google it for themselves.
Mister Bitcoin- as to your dispersions towards John’s Hopkins- Ed Miller is a great guy & could not be manipulated thusly. Please refrain from smearing a 1st rate man.
Fauci is a deep state fraud
https://amgreatness.com/2020/07/10/fauci-is-a-deep-state-fraud/